Among
the tens of thousands of
pages, Maguire opened a
Pandora's Box of vernacular
conversation of a kind that
has never been heard or read
before--
or had it?

London, Sunday, May 20, 2001

British Bugged
German POW's -- Reveals Knowledge of
Holocaust Widespread.

Jail
small talk reveals Holocaust guilt

Banter
between Nazi PoWs shows how much they knew
about the death camps, reports Ed Vulliamy

They joked about Jewish
women being sent to the gas chambers, or
about taking 'pot shots' at Jews after a
dinner party. Others cursed their
Führer and described his inner circle
as 'a loony bin'. They -- also lamented
the fact that there would be no faithful
wives or virgins left in Germany when they
returned to their ravaged Fatherland.

These are the authentic voices of
soldiers of the Third Reich: not as we are
used to hearing them -- in memoirs or on
trial -- but gossiping and chatting among
themselves, in what must be the most
remarkable bugging operation ever mounted
by British intelligence.

Conversations among Nazi prisoners were
secretly rec-orded by the Combined
Services Detailed Interrogation Centre
(UK), circulated to various intelligence
agencies, including MI19 at the War
Office, and then sent to Washington. The
transcripts are
now among a
mass of CIA documents just declassified by
the US National Archive, excavated by the
American war crimes historian, Peter
Maguire, and passed
exclusively
to The Observer .

When the documents were
declassified a
fortnight ago under the 1998 Nazi
War Crimes Disclosure Act, the mainstream
American newspapers headed straight for a
single headline-grabbing doctor's
report
[Prof.
Sauerbruch] on Hitler's
mental health, saying he was 'the craziest
criminal the world ever knew'.

'We kind of
knew that,' says Maguire, who had
different motives for examining the
documents, after the publication last
month of his book Law and War, about
the secret release of convicted Nazi
war criminals under pressure from the
US government.

He says: 'I was anxious to see if there
was further evidence that the US had
continued to recruit convicted Nazi war
criminals for Cold War espionage during
the Fifties. I wasn't even looking for
World War II documents, and what I found
bit me in the ass.'

Among the tens of thousands of pages,
Maguire opened a Pandora's Box of
vernacular conversation of a kind that has
never been heard or
read before.

Apart from their idiosyncrasies, the
documents' historical importance lies in
the extent to which knowledge of mass
extermination was widespread, despite
claims at repeated trials by leading
figures of ignorance at what was happening
in Auschwitz and Dachau. This affirmation
cuts to the core of Daniel
Goldhagen's classic book, Hitler's
Willing Executioners .

On a tape recording from 22 April 1945,
Vice-Admiral Utke asks the
Commander of the Reich's North Sea fleet,
Admiral Engel: 'Do you believe
these stories about the camps?'

'Yes of course!' replies
Engel. 'I've known myself for a long
time it was like that. We were at Posen
when that man
[Himmler]
told us how he killed the Jews. I can
well remember how he said: "When I'm
asked did you kill children as well? I
can only reply I am not such a coward
that I leave to my children a job which
I can do myself".'

Engel concludes: 'Belsen
and Buchenwald
were no surprise to me.' Utke says: 'They
are to me.' The admiral continues: 'But
the average German knows it's like that.
Haven't you heard about how the
concentration camps were from the
outside?... How the people had to run past
the Standartenführer... It was the
utter limit. Then we're surprised when the
people here reproach us for it.'

The admiral recalls a remark by an SS
colleague in a camp: 'Greiser told
me: "Do you know that the coffee you're
drinking cost me 32,000 Jewish women?!"'
Utke asks: 'Where did they go?' The
transcript continues: 'Engel: Where? To
the incinerators probably (Laughs)'.

Some of the chatter recalls specific
incidents in a conversational way never
heard before. Lieutenant Heydte
tells a story about a dinner party given
by an SS friend called
Böselager, after which the
guests then 'drove out in a car and -- it
sounds like a fairy tale but it's a fact
-- shotguns were lying about and 30 Polish
Jews were standing there. Each guest was
given a gun; the Jews were driven past and
every one was allowed to have a pot shot
at a Jew'.

Others, like Lieutenant-General
Kittel taped in late 1944, are
apparently uneasy about some of things
done their name or on their own orders,
even though he believes that the Jews are
the 'pest of the East' who should have
been 'driven into one area'.

But on another tape he describes in
detail the mass execution of Jewish women
and children in Latvia and elsewhere in
the USSR. 'Everybody. Horrible!', he says.
A Major-General Von Felbert asks:
'Were they loaded on to trains?' Kittel
replies: 'If only they had been loaded
into trains! The things I've experienced!
In Latvia... along they came again -- men,
women and children -- they were counted
off and stripped naked; the executioners
first laid all the clothes in one pile.
Then 20 women had to take up their
position -- naked -- on the edge of the
trench, they were shot and fell down into
it.'

Felbert asks: 'What did they do to the
children?' The transcript reads: 'Kittel:
(very excited): "They seized
three-year-old children by the hair, held
them up and shot them with a pistol and
threw them in. I saw that for
myself".'

On another tape, Kittel says: 'By the
way, I'm going to hold my tongue about
what I do know about these things.'

The British are in turn coy about their
means of extracting this material. One
transcript carries the note: 'If the
information in this report is required for
further distribution, prisoners' names
should not be mentioned and the text
paraphrased as to give no indication of
the methods by which it was obtained.'

Maguire says: 'The British
interrogators were much more sophisticated
than the Americans. They would win their
prisoners' trust with small gestures, good
food' -- a point borne out by
conversations between the Germans. 'I
wonder how many of these officers thought
they had kept a stiff upper lip under
interrogation, only to have their private
conversations taped! As evidence it's
problematic because of the method, but as
testimony it's remarkable -- moral guilt
is not the same as legal guilt.'

The most senior prisoner taped is
General von Thoma, one of Rommel's
commanders in the Afrika Korps captured in
1942.

Between 18 and 19 May 1945, Thoma
converses with the taped prisoner closest
to Hitler's inner circle, Lt-Gen
Kurt Dittmar. They discuss the Nazi
high command: 'It must have been absolute
torture for you,' chides Thoma, 'I always
used to say: "Good old Dittmar, you can
tell what he's feeling by the difficulty
he has in getting his words out"... It
seems to have become a loony-bin on
wheels.'

Dittmar agrees, and goes on to talk
about Josef Goebbels: 'Goebbels
was... deliberately telling lies. His most
intimate circle lied to him...'

But genuine disillusion runs deep among
some officers. Lieutenant-General
Schaefer laments, in November 1944,
that 'one might think no one was really no
longer bound to the Führer... I mean,
when one goes over all the crimes
committed, it makes one's hair stand on
end... One can only think that if Germany
is destroyed, it is justice and nothing
else.'

In one conversation, the Germans wonder
what has happened to their womenfolk. 'The
ones [of us] who are married,'
says one, 'can be quite certain that their
wives have had relations with someone
else, and those who are single are not
likely to find a virgin over the age of 18
when they get home.'

Guardian
Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited
2001

This
website reports:

OF COURSE, there is nothing
new whatever about these
top-secret CSDIC reports of the
top-secret transcripts on senior
Nazi prisoners' conversations.
They have been open to diligent
researchers in the British Public
Record office since the early
1980s. Even before then David
Irving had obtained genuinely
exclusive access by various means
to isolated copies of these
valuable reports, and they are
quoted in the 1977 edition of his
book Hitler's
War. In 1970 Harold
Wilson's government considered
prosecuting Mr Irving because
of his use of these secret
documents.

Most
other historians have remained
totally ignorant of this
resource. Asked about the CSDIC
reports in the High Court,
Deborah Lipstadt's "neutral"
witness Prof. Richard
Evans (right, fee:
$200,000 plus $1m book
contract) , who claimed to be an
expert on the Third Reich,
admitted on Day 22, February 17,
2000, page 84 [see the
trial transcripts], that
he knew nothing of their
existence and had NEVER worked in
these files!

IRVING:
Are you familiar with these
CSDIC reports? Have you worked
with them in any
detail?

EVANS:
I have not, no.

IRVING:
You have not?

EVANS:
No.

IRVING:
There is something like 50,000
pages of these overheard
conversations with top Nazis
and you never used
them?

MR
JUSTICE GRAY: Well, come on,
Mr Irving, is that
helpful?

In the mid 1980s David Irving
secured formal HMSO permission to
prepare an edited volume of the
CSDIC reports for publication in
German (they are Crown
copyright).

It was the summer of 1993
before Mr Irving completed work
on the selection and editing of
these and of the Farm Hall
transcripts -- hidden-microphone
recordings of the German atomic
scientists held in British
captivity, for the release of
which he had campaigned since
1967.

When Mr Irving delivered the
completed manuscript to his
German publisher
Langen-Müller Verlag, of
Munich, who had commissioned the
book, they decided to his fury
not to publish it (senior editor
Rochus von Zabüsnig
complained that it would look
like "Nestbe-schmützung", as
some of the overheard remarks by
Nazi prisoners like General
Walter Bruns revealed
unwelcome details of atrocities).
This work is now published on
this website in PDF format as a
free download, pending
publication in a print
edition.